Status woe on roads as county passes a survival budget
Roads occupy a mythic place in the American landscape, as paths of possibility and self-determination. In Santa Cruz County, particularly in its diverse rural parts, roads have increasingly become an obstacle, thoroughfares of countless orange cones, indefinite detours and crumbling concrete.
The county’s road infrastructure is the front line for its battle against climate change, whether it’s battered by rising sea levels, smothered under landslides, or slipping out with flood waters. Since 2017, the county has completed a dizzying 282 storm-repair projects, largely along roads, and spent $350 million on road work. It has hardly been enough.
A new report from the county’s civil grand jury, the state-mandated, volunteer government watchdog, criticizes the county government for its reactive, yet conservative, road maintenance policy. The backlog for road and culvert maintenance is more than $800 million, according to the report.
The report, published last Wednesday, was timely. One day prior, the board of supervisors adopted its 2024-25 budget after a series of public hearings in which roads took center stage and sparked one of the year’s most intense debates between the county’s government leaders and its elected representatives.
Of Note
“It’s not possible to stop it”: That was the answer from Jamileh Cannon, lead architect and co-founder of local developer Workbench, when a resident asked whether the community could stop the 16-story mixed-use residential tower envisioned for the lot behind the Santa Cruz town clock.
Cannon and the Workbench team formally introduced the project to the community during a nearly two-hour virtual town hall last Wednesday. More than 200 people tuned in and asked around 300 questions about the project in a live Q&A chat during the meeting. The question of whether the community could say no to such an abnormally large project has loomed large in Santa Cruz recently, as development pressure and new state laws clear the way for larger, denser and wholly new kinds of projects within the city.
The June 5 meeting was one of several upcoming gatherings around a project that promises to reset development potential in Santa Cruz County.
A trans sanctuary: In a unanimous decision last Tuesday, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors voted to make the county a sanctuary for “transgender, gender queer, non-binary, gender fluid and intersex people.” The resolution, brought by District 3 Supervisor Justin Cummings, acknowledged that the county already offers gender-affirming health care services, but wanted to emphasize the county’s position by “send[ing] a strong message of solidarity and protection … affirming Santa Cruz County is a safe haven where their rights and well-being are protected.”
Looking Ahead
City of Santa Cruz’s $431 million budget: The Santa Cruz City Council will meet Tuesday to vote on its 2024-25 budget. Although there was a bump in general fund revenue over last year’s adopted budget from $130 million to $151 million, the city says the budget is largely a status quo budget, “as increased demands for city services and the implementation of important council priorities have strained the city’s fiscal capacity.”
Watsonville eyes a $268 million budget: The City of Watsonville, under interim city manager Tamara Vides, will present its 2024-25 budget to the city council on Tuesday. The city says its expenses are outpacing its revenues, and is recommending a hiring pause for some vacant positions, and will eliminate two vacant positions to free up some cash: the redevelopment manager and the parking control officer.
Weekly News Diet
Local: The long-awaited and oft-litigated UC Santa Cruz housing development Student Housing West is set to soon break ground. As my colleague Hillary Ojeda reports, fences around the East Meadow site went up last week, signaling a ramp-up for the 140-unit building that has been years in the making. Not everyone, however, is elated.
Golden State: Bolinas, one of my favorite small towns in California, has gone more than 450 days without a local post office, after the federal branch lost its local brick-and-mortar due to a spat with the landlord. Many people in the west Marin County town do not get home delivery, and have had to drive 40 minutes to pick up their mail. Hailey Branson-Potts has that story for the Los Angeles Times.
Global: U.S. diplomacy in West Africa over the past two decades has largely failed, as class uprisings and military coups have created a vacuum for terrorist organizations, such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, to come into power. Those organizations have then turned away from the U.S. and toward Russia and China for partnerships. Eric Schmitt and Ruth Maclean traveled to West Africa to report this one for The New York Times.
One Great Read
Richard Linklater sees the killer in us all by David Marchese for The New York Times Magazine
(Linklater’s new ro-medy thriller, “Hit Man,” is now streaming on Netflix.)
It’s a curse, Texas-born and bred filmmaker Richard Linklater says, to be an artist, as there is often, if not always, a layer of remove between you and your experience. There’s a mentality that “this will only be real when I process it through my art form,” Linklater tells New York Times Magazine writer David Marchese in this beautiful Q&A published earlier this month.
As a writer, and as a journalist, I deeply relate to this. I said as much in an interview I recorded recently about our role in covering the January 2023 floods: I’ve found I tend to kind of float above experiences and events as they’re happening. Despite my proximity to the stories of a particular moment, I’m not often fully enmeshed in them. Instead, I’m taking stock from a removed position in order to attempt to see wholly and write accurately, rather than passionately. All stories are a matter of perspective, and as a journalist I often import that perspective from the people who are inside the story. Outside of journalism, in my own writing, I’ve found myself experiencing events from the perspective of “this is good stuff,” to inform my writing later. Sometimes this can be a benefit, an exercise in Zen detachment and dissolution of the self from the center. It can also be alienating. I’ve gotten better about it in recent years, but the instinct is still there.
Linklater occupies a special place in my personal cinema canon. He transcends placement on a directors’ Rushmore. I’ve grown up with and through his work, which has always reminded me of the beauty and import of everyday life and conversation. But as I found myself reading this interview, I wondered: If Linklater is always experiencing life one layer removed from the moment, how can he know that his depictions on-screen are true to life and experience?
As always, I encourage you to send along your thoughts and reading recommendations. See you next week!
Chris